What, exactly, is attention? We all know what it is from our own experience,
and it is certainly important in changing minds. Without attention, others do
not listen to what you say, let alone consider your suggestions.

Heightened arousal

To be awake and conscious is to have some kind of attention, either to the
world around us or to our thoughts. We also have attention during the false
consciousness of dreaming.
In everyday life, attention is linked with arousal
as it cues this state in readiness for action. This may also create a state of
intensity, where we put significant effort into attending (for example to a
nearby threat or item of interest).

The spotlight

William James' Spotlight model views attention as being like a torch, with a
central focus, a margin and a fringe. An evolution of this is Eriksen and St.
James' Zoom-Lens Model, which adds the ability to zoom in and zoom out, like a
camera.

Interestingly, we can pay attention to things without pointing at them, for
example where we notice an attractive person at a party and watch them covertly
without staring at them. Despite this, we may still leak small cues that lets
them know we are interested. This is how many romances have started.

Attention can also be a very broad light, for example where a martial artist
spreads their attention to take in all movement around them. Prey also spread
their attention wide, which is why they often have eyes on either side of their
head in order to maximize their field of view.

Limited focus

Attention is affected by our limited capacity. When we are attracted by
something, there is competition with other items for further attention.

As we live there are many things that could take our attention at any moment,
yet consciousness is a serial process that limits attention. We can hence only attend directly to very few
things at a time (and are best when we are attending to one). Attention acts as
a focus, helping us gain information about those things that might be of greater interest or
importance for us.

The choice of where to attend may be automatic (as when responding to an
attack) or a more thoughtful decision. We may cope with multiple demands by
either switching between items (divided attention) or reducing the number of
items to which we attend, often ideally to one.

Wickens’ (1984) Multiple Resource Theory suggests that we have multiple
(rather than one) pools of resource across senses, stages of perception and
reasoning that we can use at the same time, allowing us to attend in complex
ways. However we may still run out of these finite resources and so our
attention is limited by our workload.

We are also limited by the duration and intensity of attention that we can
use without drifting off or being distracted. Like the blinking of an eye,
we often do not realize we have temporarily less attention than we intend. Jha et al (2007) showed
that mindfulness training can increase our ability to sustain attention. This is
perhaps unsurprising, given that mediation is very largely about attention.

Attentive by design

We are designed for visual attention. In the middle of the retina of the eye,
which is the central point of our vision and the focus point of where we look,
is the fovea centralis. This gives us sharp vision at our point of attention.
Outside this, our vision becomes less detailed and, in the outer regions, black
and white (though our brains fill in hues so we think we have full vision). When
we are looking hard at something, we pay more attention to this central detail
and ignore peripheral information. We can focus on other senses too, though this
is done more by the brain.

This ability to ignore that which is not important and focus on that which is
important is a very useful attribute that has evolved to a high degree in many
species, which indicates its evolutionary value. Attention is also related to
automatic action, such as when we block a punch without thinking too hard about
it.

In humans, our consciousness and complexity lets us be more deliberate in our
attending, though deeper factors still pull our attention away to more primitive
cues.

Selective attention

We have a remarkable ability to choose the things to which we pay attention
and ignore those which are not important. We can even ignore pain when there is
motivation to pay attention elsewhere (for example when we are fighting). Other
examples include not hearing ticking clocks and the real world 'disappearing'
when we are reading an engrossing novel. In what is called the 'Cocktail Party Effect' we are able to hear just one voice when many people are speaking.

There have been a number of models proposed to describe how we are able to
pay attention to a limited part of our sensory input, effectively ignoring the
rest, including:

Broadbent's (1958) Filter Model of attention in hearing suggests we have
a sensory buffer that stores inputs, from which we select items for further
attention, based on physical characteristics of the received information. In
this way we can listen to information from one ear, ignoring that from the
other ear.

Treisman's (1964) Attenuation Model is similar to Broadbent's, but
suggests we attenuate rather than eliminate unwanted information. It is as
if we have a volume control that can turn down things we do not want to
hear.

Treisman and Gellade's (1980) Feature Integration Theory suggests that
attention attention acts to collate different features of an object into
distinct experiences.

Conscious or unconscious

Attention can happen through conscious and unconscious routes, typically
being driven automatically by external events or by our deliberate
choices (Theeuwes, 1991).

In stimulus-driven attention (also known as bottom-up or exogenous
attention), we are unconsciously forced to pay attention to an external event.
This is typically something unusual that could be a threat. Evolution has taught
us that attention to such events could save our lives.

In Goal-driven attention (also known as top-down, endogenous, attentional
control or executive attention), we consciously choose to pay attention to
things of interest. Typically these are related to things of general or specific
importance to us. For example I have a general interest in cars, so will pay
attention to adverts for cars. I may have a specific interest in lions and will
go out of my way to visit a zoo to spend much time with them.

Internal or external

A particular separation of attention is between inner (endogenous) thoughts
and outer (exogenous) experiences, as appear through our senses (Posner, 1980).
When we sit in a meeting at work or just in the company of others, we may
struggle to keep attention to people who are talking about things where we have
little interest. As we drift off into internal thought, either thinking about
the work topics, for example in formulating what we want to say, or daydreaming
about other parts of our life.

By and large, external events can grab us more strongly than internal
thoughts, although individuals spend more or less in their inner worlds as
opposed to connecting with others and the world around them. External stimuli
that grab attention can include loud noises, bright hues, unexpected events and
so on. Internal events that grab attention include ideas, sudden thoughts and
revelations.

So what?

Understand how attention works and then use it in the first step to gain
attention to what you have to say. Then work to both gain it and sustain it.